Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions

jonobacon.org

18 pointsmgunes11 comments

These discussions are really tiring. First it was "Canonical is not contributing to the kernel", now it's "Canonical is not contributing to GNOME", ... Isn't the point of free software that people can take the code and build whatever they want to build on top of it? The consequence: people can use the code it without owing you anything. Apart from the strictly legal side, there is of course the question of moral behaviour, but even there I don't see the point of the complainers, since

* AFAIK, canonical never claimed to be the driving force behind GNOME development.

* Even if they could be doing more for the upstream development, what is the net harm that canonical is doing to linux? What is keeping people who don't like ubuntu from ignoring it, and going on with their business the way they did back when ubuntu didn't exist?

Constructive criticism is ok, but the belligerent tone of the accusations gives the impression that this is ultimately about hurt egos.

You are right about the tone used in some of these discussions, but on the other hand I think that the public should know who's really doing more for GNOME, the Linux kernel etc.

This might be true, but I personally find it pretty embarrassing that Microsoft has made more contributions in terms of code than Canonical to the Linux kernel tree (as of a few months back when GregKH gave a talk at MS).

Don't get me wrong, Canonical is within their rights to do all of this, but from a moral perspective I think they owe it to be doing more towards contributing back to others' work instead of always promoting their own projects in Launchpad

I wonder at what level people really do care about that.

To be fair, citing upstart, launchpad, and bazaar as "upstream" is pretty disingenuous.

Why can't upstart and bazaar be called upstream? Fedora has used upstart and bazaar is in use outside Ubuntu and Launchpad.

Because they were started by, and are still mostly (unless I'm gravely mistaken) developed only by the same people that develop for Ubuntu. If they were more autonomous, I'd be more willing to consider them "upstream".

they don't relate the the core technologies (kernal & GNOME) being discussed.

It might have been, in your sense, had he included them in the list of GNOME-related components:

> The above list also doesn’t include significant upstream investment in other areas such as Upstart, Bazaar, Launchpad, and a full team building Ubuntu.

If Red Hat has contributed 16% and Canonical contributed 1%, isn't that about equal when you normalize for the size of those organizations? I don't have a good sense of how big Canonical is, but Red Hat is a ~6 billion dollar company and quite likely 16 times (or more) bigger than Canonical. Even if that ratio doesn't quite hold up it's still pretty unfair to compare two organizations operating on different orders of magnitude.

Not long ago they said Cannonical was 200 employees, with about half of them in Taiwan working on netbooks and other embedded devices

They probably only have a couple of dozen programmers. Although they are growing all the time.

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